


empyreal crown, my pale morning star

by meritmut



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Character Study, F/M, Fix-It, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Post-Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-12-27
Updated: 2020-05-18
Packaged: 2021-02-25 22:41:37
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 13,436
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21993118
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/meritmut/pseuds/meritmut
Summary: No more waiting for others to decide her fate. No more losing. The universe had taken so much from her—this time, she would take it back.Or: after, and maybe before.
Relationships: Kylo Ren/Rey, Rey & Rose Tico, Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Comments: 84
Kudos: 135





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> this wasn't where this was going originally but, hey ho
> 
> love to [Melusine11](https://archiveofourown.org/users/melusine11) and [Elywyngirlie](https://archiveofourown.org/users/elywyngirlie) for glancing over this 💜

_Exegol_

⚶

He was still warm under her hands.

Rey could feel it, the way she could feel the stone digging into her knees and the frigid air of this strange, dark place chilling the sweat on her skin: the way she could hear the blood pounding in her ears and the distant rumble of battle overhead and, closer, beneath it all, a soft scuffing like some small wounded creature dragging itself over the ground. She felt it all, yet none of it seemed real.

Curling her fingers into the dark cloth, she gripped it tightly, as if she could hold onto the fading warmth of him; as if she might will him back to life with nothing but want.

Stupid. Wanting had never brought anything back. If there were any power in wishing then her life would have been very different. She had saved Ben once already: she was not enough of a fool to imagine the Force might be so kind a second time.

It was just...she had thought...had _hoped_...

For a few dazed seconds she had begun to believe that this might be it. He was there, solid and strong and _real_ beneath her; above her, surrounding her and cradling her with such desperate gentleness she had feared fleetingly that she would break, that his touch had found her shatterpoints and if he applied more pressure than a feather’s weight it would be the end of her. One broad hand had wrapped around the back of her neck, his fingers resting lightly against the base of her skull while the other covered her midriff, and from his careful touch she’d felt the unfurling blaze of _life_ flowing into her. Life, _his_ life, flooding through her like the sunrise over the dunes, like the roar of Ahch-To’s tides, chasing away the cold that had crept into her body and spreading through her extremities until every part of Rey _sang_ with elation to be alive again.

Returning to herself like that, opening her eyes to find his face so close and his voice in her mind pleading _come back, please, please_ _come back—_ stars, she had wanted so much to answer but she could barely speak for the mingled wonder and joy that held her throat in a vice, because Ben had _come for her_.

She had felt, too, the overwhelming force of his conviction, the ferocity of his determination to retrieve her from the darkness no matter what it cost him. Whatever happened, whatever the Force demanded of him in return, was of no consequence: all that mattered to him now was the single driving imperative to _save her._

It was a kind of need she had never known one person could feel for another; of which she had never once been the focus. It was love, she thought.

She’d felt it, blossoming inside her like the first rainfall after a long drought as she looked into his eyes and found herself smiling at what she found there; found her hands of their own accord rising to his face and mapping out its irregular planes the way she had wanted to for so very long; found herself moving, surging forward to find his mouth and see if his lips were as sweet as they had always looked—

And then he was gone.

The bond was a wound inside her, a phantom limb searching blindly for its other half. It ached, dully, in that space beneath her breastbone; the place she had come to associate with him, but when she focused on the knot in her chest and prodded tentatively at its raw edges, the pain that sheared through her was sudden and breathtaking and Rey had to blink away the tears that sprang to her eyes.

It wasn’t _gone,_ though, and this startled her. It was there, still, like a loose tooth or a broken bone that hadn’t set right. It was just...severed.

Better had it vanished altogether, dissipated into nothing and left her hollow, than this.

Was this how it would be, then? She lifted a hand and pressed it against her sternum, the other still clutching his shirt as she searched inside herself for any trace of that missing piece. There was nothing: no second heart lying still beside her own, no tangible sign of the fracture his death had left behind except the break itself. Was this what it meant, to live on as one half of a severed bond—to walk forever with a ghost at her shoulder, an everlasting reminder that she was no longer whole?

The hand at her chest curled into a fist. He had ripped a part of her away with his passing, and if this was to be her future then she would hate him for it. She would take all of the hurt inside her and cauterise the wound he’d left and scorch even the memory of him from her heart, scour every last trace of him until she was whole again. Until—

Rey could not even finish the thought, because she had seen the helpless dread in Ben’s eyes in that last moment, had felt him _cry out_ in the Force as the life slipped out of him, and she knew this was not what he had wanted either.

 _Where are you,_ she thought numbly. _Where did you go?_

He did not answer, of course. He was not there.

_Come back._

_Don’t leave me here alone._

⚶

Hours passed, or maybe it was only moments.

The battle raged on above her. Between the boom and rumble of cannonfire and thunder came the screech of smaller fighters veering in and out amongst the capital ships, venturing as far as they dared into the gravity well’s tug. Rey had no idea of what transpired up there but she could _feel_ the disturbance in the air, the malevolent power wrapped around the planet which drew all things down into its abyssal grip, and she knew time was running short.

Still she knelt upon the ground where she had fallen, where Ben had lifted her up again.

She cast about in desperation, searching for something— _anything_ that might help, swallowing against the knot of grief lodged in her throat until she felt the threat of tears ebb.

The Sith whispered in her mind, their presence imbued in the very stones of this place, piercing the fog of shock and confusion filling her head with promises of vengeance, of _justice_ , of a way to make things right.

Her gaze fell upon the vacant throne.

There was a way. All she had to do was claim it.

To bring someone back…it was within the power of the Sith, wasn’t it? He, Palpatine, through whatever twisted means, had done it. He had thrown off the bonds of death and come back from the other side.

That power was hers now.

Every fibre of her rejected the thought. Rejected it more completely than the truth about her parents: than the realisation that they had abandoned her willingly in that loveless hellhole—because they had, in the end, whether it was for her supposed ‘protection’ or for their own selfish ends.

They had loved her, said Ben, given everything to save her, but how had the life she’d lived been any better than the one from which they had died to spare her? How had a life of hunger, of hunger and isolation and fruitless, back-breaking labour, been the better choice?

Better than the very fate which lay before her now?

Rey stared at the throne, as stark and lifeless as the span of empty years she’d left behind on Jakku.

How could _that_ have been better than this?

In what world could chains and servitude be better than a crown?

How much could they have loved her, really, she thought bitterly, letting the shirt slip from her hands as she rose unsteadily to her feet and took first one, then another, wobbly step toward the dais. The whispers intensified as she drew closer, coaxing her on in the spectral voices of the eternal Sith. She did not know them, any more than she knew the faces of the statues lying broken around the hall, those towering figures of forgotten lords cast down in Palpatine’s final moments. Were they of her blood, too?

Were they the family she had dreamt of for so long?

The throne’s shadow fell over her. She had heard enough legends of the Sith to know that power passed from teacher to student not by blood alone but by the shedding of it: had she not earned it twice over, then? She had killed her own grandsire, if it could be called _killing_ to stamp the foul breath from something barely alive to begin with. She was the only one left: there was no other to claim what might, in another life, have been her birthright.

No one but Ben, who had given his own life for her. Would it not be an act of redress, then, the final restoration of the balance, for the heir of the Sith to save the last Skywalker?

Let the Palpatine name rot here, she decided. She would die before she took it as her own: she would cross to the Netherworld of the Force and spit at the old man’s feet before she accepted anything of _his._ Yet he had offered her more than a name; he had offered real, tangible _power,_ and if it meant Ben’s salvation then what did she have to lose? She had never wanted power, had never sought control over anything but her own destiny, but up there in the sky her friends were dying and down here Ben was _dead_ and she was just so _tired_ of losing, of daring to hope; of glimpsing a future only to have her fledgling faith ripped away in an instant. How much more could the Force take from her? When would enough be enough?

Rey ascended the first step. Empress of the Sith. The notion of it daunted her but it beckoned too, filled her head with promises and possibilities of everything that would be _hers_ if she would only stretch out her hand and claim it. She could affect more than her own destiny from that throne. She could affect the entire galaxy.

She thought again of Jakku. She could change that broken world. She could make it so that no other child was ever sold, be it for _love_ or otherwise. She could make it so that no one ever hungered, ever suffered for want of medicine or despaired for want of hope as she had.

She could burn the likes of Unkar Plutt until they were dust.

 _I would scour that planet clean and start again,_ she thought as she mounted the second step, her feet moving soundlessly over the stone. _I would tear the hearts out of the slavers and feed them to the children that begged on Niima’s outskirts._

Let any man try and stop her.

Again that sound reached her ears, a faint scuffing rasp barely audible over the relentless crooning of the Sith. Something was alive down here—vermin, maybe, or unquiet ghosts, or another of Palpatine's monstrosities left to fend for itself down here in the dark. Rey glanced toward the dim forms of the tanks that had survived the collapse, like eerie lanterns with half-formed clones suspended within. Revulsion filled her, but she did not turn away.

Staring into Snoke's dead, fishlike eyes, she felt the fire of rage ignite inside her at the memory of his malice and she let the flames take hold: shivers coursed through her limbs, the edges of her vision tinting red. She wished, then, that she could have mustered the lightning for _him_.

She wished that she’d learned the whole story then. No more half-truths, no more illusions, no more girlish daydreams of a happy ending that would never come. How much time had she wasted in believing she was meant for the path of the Jedi—that she was _worthy_ of it—that she might have saved if she had known the truth from the start?

She wished Ben had been crueler. Maybe he would still be alive. Maybe she would have taken his hand.

Maybe, if she had done so, they would be happy.

She had been a fool to believe that anyone was coming to save her, that anyone could vindicate those lost years. She had been blind to imagine she could ever have been a Jedi, but she could still fix this. It wasn’t too late.

No more waiting for others to decide her fate. No more losing. The universe had taken so much from her: this time, perhaps, she would take it back.

She came to an abrupt halt, one foot poised to alight upon the final step. The breath caught in her throat, every muscle frozen, every sense straining to the very limit of her awareness.

 _There!_ There it was again, faint as a whisper and slight as a shadow: a sound. A new sound. Rey dared not move for fear of missing it again. It had come from somewhere behind her, she thought, though the chamber’s cavernous expanse conjured strange distorted echoes out of the darkness and she could not be sure. A handful of tense seconds passed before she heard it again, clearer this time, reverberating in the air around her before it was swallowed by the gloom, drowned out by the eerie polyphony of the Sith. To her ears it sounded almost like a groan torn from the guts of an animal in the very depths of suffering; there was no mistaking it for anything other than a living thing.

She had more than ghosts for company down here after all, it seemed.

Closing her eyes, Rey straightened her spine and forced her shoulders to relax, drawing in a long, steadying breath through her nose. The air smelled musty, full of the cloying staleness that came from age and decay despite the clear night pouring in from above, but there was something else there too—something sharp and chemical, almost metallic, with a sour edge that turned her stomach. She thought of the creatures in the tanks again, those unfinished abominations hanging lifeless in their greenish tombs, and shuddered. There had been little interest in preserving the dead on Jakku, when the living were so wholly outnumbered to begin with, but she knew the acrid reek of embalming fluid well enough.

Rey held her breath for as long as it took for her shoulder muscles to loosen and then released it, slowly, eyes still closed, focussing her mind on the simple mechanics of pushing air in and out until she felt as serene as she ever would. Her heart still raced, her throat was still raw with the threat of tears, but she was calm. Then, as she had been taught, she found the thread of the Force where it sat beneath her ribcage, that skein of gold through which the entire universe flowed into her, and, grasping it firmly in her mind, she _reached out._

Past the beckoning lure of the Sith, beneath the crumbled ruins into the furthest corners of this colossal hall she reached; into the cracks between atoms, into the space between spaces. Searching, _feeling,_ just as Skywalker had shown her, for that other source of life, calling Leia’s lightsaber to her hand as she did so in case it was some newly-awoken Sithspawn waiting to spring from the shadows.

But it was too small, too weak to be one of those aberrations she had read about, and too _alive_ to belong to a ghost. She could feel it on the very edge of her senses, just a glimmer half-buried beneath the crushing weight of the dark; a lone, guttering candle flame struggling to hold back the night. It was there, though, unmistakably, and now she was aware of it impossible to ignore. Turning away from the throne, Rey descended the dais again and surrendered herself to the _pull_ of that flickering light, the only sign of life amid the ruins, retracing her steps toward where the small heap of clothes still lay abandoned and probably long gone cold, all that remained of—

The lightsaber slipped from her grasp, clattering to the ground as finally she recognised that failing Force signature.

_Ben?_

She stumbled in shock, only her reflexes saving her from sprawling forward on her hands and knees—though not from the pain that flared through her foot as it caught on a fissure in the stone, ripping a curse from her lips that Rey was too stunned to even hear. Her vision blurred. Keener than any blade was the relief that pierced her heart and she could have wept for it, but instead she blinked away the rush of tears and began to stagger forward again, making this time for the edge of the chasm into which Ben had disappeared.

She could feel him now, his frail life force bleeding into the bond like a distress signal, a beacon to guide her through the choking miasma of the dark—stars, how could she have missed it?

The thought made her falter again.

Doubt crept in. She had allowed hope to deceive her before. In this place, where the ancient dead sang and the Sith throne beckoned with all the treacherous allure of the dark side of the Force, how could she trust anything her senses told her?

Letting her eyes fall closed once more, she thought back to the sea-cave beneath Nimue. The dark had never lied to her. It had never made any attempt to soften its blows, even when it revealed truths she did not wish to see. The Jedi called it treacherous, seductive, and perhaps it was—like standing at the edge of a precipice, teetering on the brink with only your balance to keep you from plummeting. Perhaps it was like that.

Another memory: perched atop the prow of a scuttled star destroyer, all that was left of the fallen giant a durasteel mountain thrusting up out of the sands. Hundreds of feet up and below her only air; only the wind in her face and the sun on her skin and the inexorable pull of gravity beckoning her over the edge.

She did not feel that pull now.

She felt only the insistent call of the bond urging her forward: with every step it grew stronger but for the first time her mind was clear.

Maybe this was a trap. Maybe it was an answer. Maybe it was nothing at all.

She could bear it, no matter which.

She had borne everything. Every trial the universe had ever thrown at her, every loss and deprivation and betrayal and senseless shattering of hope: every hour of hunger and frigid desert night, for five thousand days she had endured and endured until the bitter slog of survival was all she knew. _Survive:_ that had been her mantra. _Live to see another day._ Nothing had changed. She was still that girl, still carried the wasteland in her marrow and her blood, and she knew now that no matter how far she ran she always would be.

 _I am Rey of Jakku,_ she thought, opening her eyes to face the unknown head-on. _Whatever you have for me, I will outlast it_


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> love to my Melusine for the encouragement, everyone go read her fix-its [here](https://archiveofourown.org/works/21945175) and [here](https://archiveofourown.org/works/22088593) (and then everything else she's written)

_Above_

⚶

When the planet’s ionosphere released her, Rey felt for a brief span of time that she was floating. There was still gravity to contend with; still the erratic pulsing of magnetic discharge from the local star that ricocheted off the iron in Exegol’s crust and created a deadly maelstrom of charged particles in the atmosphere—and Exegol itself would not relinquish its grip quite so easily, dark noxious whorls of Force energy trailing from the starfighter’s wings like leaking fuel—but once she was clear of the worst of the static fields it became much smoother flying. Rey guided the old X-wing up into the black with one final nudge in the Force, glancing back only once to ensure she was not followed.

She missed the chaos as soon as she was free of it. Up here, beyond the smoking carnage of the battle that had taken place in orbit, it was quiet. Too quiet. She needed to concentrate: needed something to demand her focus and keep it so she could not dwell on other things. She needed a life-or-death challenge at her fingertips to get her out of her own head, and Red Five might have seen better days even before her long repose beneath the sea but after the  _ Falcon _ there was very little that could faze Rey. Besides—countless thousands of hours’ of flight simulations had ensured she could handle a T-65B in her sleep. A little bit of rust and sticky steering was child’s play.

More was the pity. With nothing to occupy her but navigating the debris from the battle, the sound of her own breathing in her ears and the gradual sense of a weight sliding off her chest as every klick she put between herself and Exegol dispelled its malevolent influence from her mind, for the first time in days, it felt, Rey could breathe—and so, too, could the thoughts she had been trying to avoid come creeping back in.

The adrenaline had worn off and left her numb. She felt hollowed out, as if something had taken a knife to her insides and scraped her clean like a pelt for tanning. She didn’t  _ feel  _ clean, though. She was covered in grime, sweat and blood, the warmth of which had long since faded and left her shaking with the chill of space.

Shock could do that as well, she remembered absently, drumming her fingers against the throttle. Shock could make everything feel wrong.

Or, maybe, everything was just wrong.

There was nothing doing about it now, though: not till she made it back to base or found a safe place to stop along the way. In either case it would be many hours before she could clean up, and by then the exhaustion would have begun to take its toll because there was no chance of her sleeping, either: it was too risky, even if she could have entrusted the sublight trip to autopilot—even if she made it past the solar winds and magnetic dead zones, the treacherous gravity sinks that pockmarked the system like invisible pit traps, that was only the beginning of the dangers of the Unknown Regions.

She had heard stories of rogue stars that could kill a ship’s systems with a single flare, of strange sonar pulses emanating from the void with no point of origin and no apparent destination; of ships long since abandoned drifting derelict through the dark, sometimes still with distress beacons broadcasting their vanished crews’ final moments to the stars; of warps in the fabric of reality itself that could snatch you from one sector and deposit you in another entirely, if they returned you at all—and that was to say nothing of the things that  _ lived  _ out here.

Rey had heard those stories, too, and she had no wish to encounter them for herself.

⚶

Below her feet the chasm fell away, a wide breach in the earth cascading sharply downward into an abyss filled with swirling silver fog, illuminated by a flickering blue glow that called to mind the bioluminescent life-forms which, after a violent squall, would wash up along the shores of Ahch-To’s islands. The impression of gazing  _ down  _ into a sky full of storm-clouds had her head spinning with sudden vertigo and Rey fought the urge to grasp the crevasse’s edge with both hands, knocked askew by the overwhelming sensation that the world had turned on its head.

The light began to change as the bond’s tug intensified, as if the one held some force over the other, the awareness of  _ Ben  _ luring her closer to the precipice. The flashes that pierced the mist then were like no lightning Rey had ever seen: not jagged fractal splinters but brilliant arcs of silver-white radiance which seemed to move with a purpose of their own, darting and soaring like otherworldly birds through the dark. She could not perceive the source of them, nor the place where the chasm finally came to an end—down and down it went with no sign that there even  _ was  _ an end but she knew, instinctively, that there was something down there. Something old, and vast, and  _ patient _ .

Something for which the Sith faithful had been searching.

She could feel them, too, the echo of long years spent tunnelling into Exegol's barren crust to find the secrets buried at its heart, the past imprinted on the present in the lingering memory of their frustration; their single-minded drive toward an unknown end ingrained in the very stone.

Had Luke been searching for it too? Was that why he had tried so hard to find this place?

She thought again of Nimue, that strange dreamlike haven in a restless silver sea. Time moved strangely there, too. In her memory of the planet there were hours that had felt like days, every second slipping by with the alacrity of spilled molasses until she understood, after a while, how a handful of years could have made an old man of Luke. There were times, too, when it had seemed that whole ages of the galaxy were collapsing into one, as if some great cosmic hand were flipping through a book so quickly the pages blurred together, the weft of time folding in upon itself until as she walked the uneven pathways of the island Rey had half-expected to meet herself coming.

On Ahch-To, reality itself felt thin and uncertain, and as the long hours passed she had begun to feel thin and uncertain too. It wasn’t until she had stopped waiting for answers, and gone down into the island’s subaqueous depths to  _ find  _ them that she had felt herself again, for whatever that was worth: whoever that had turned out to be.

Crouched on the brink of the void, gazing down into that murky unknown, Rey felt that sense of fragility creep over her again. The  _ thinness  _ of time and space, and the liminal worlds betwixt them: the utter ephemerality of being in a place that belonged so wholly to the Force.

Out of the fog drifted muffled voices, borne on the fetid air along with the cloying scent of damp. Slowly, carefully, Rey set the saber down so she could support herself with both hands as she leant over the edge, listening for a voice she knew,  _ feeling  _ for that faint familiar presence in the Force.

_ Where are you? _

Searching the gloom, stretching every sense to its limit even as she became aware, distantly, of debris from the battle overhead beginning to rain down on the planet, until she heard again the echo of that stifled groan and realised she had answered her own question.

Echoes. Memories. Spectres of the past entombed here, preserved like insects in amber. Nothing more than ghosts.

He had died here, and it seemed that a part of him would live always here too. Whatever she was sensing; whatever presence she thought was calling out to her from the chasm was only an artefact of time’s distortion, a mayday signal winking out into the darkness long after the ship and all its crew had gone cold.

She really was alone.

⚶

Rey thumbed through the frequencies until she heard a familiar voice, and then another. No way of knowing yet who had survived and who had not: there would be more losses to come, before the day was out.

Officers were calling for those who lived to sound off, but Rey said nothing. She opened her mouth to speak, to let command know that she’d made it off the planet, but when she tried to push the words out they refused to come. Her lips shaped the words— _ I’m here, I’m alive, I’m coming, _ and they withered into silence on her tongue.

Her ship was visible to their scanners: that would have to be enough.

Though the comm chatter went some way to filling the silence it faded quickly into white noise, and she was left once more with only the view beyond the cockpit for company; that ever-unfolding immensity of stars. Ahead, the perpetual solar storms that had protected Exegol till now blazed in livid scarlets and purples, a wound in space itself pumping cosmic lifeblood into the void.

The Unknown Regions. As a girl Rey had been captivated by the very notion of uncharted space, spinning elaborate daydreams wherein her family would come back full of tales of their adventures—of the perils they had overcome, out in the great unexplored infinite, to make it back to her. Maybe they had gotten lost out there, she would muse. Maybe that was why they had never returned. Maybe they had been trying, all this time, but they needed Rey to grow up and build something that could guide them home—and then, when they made it, when they had found her, they would take her away from Jakku and she would get to go on adventures with them too, helping them to map out the furthest reaches of the galaxy, travelling into the unknown together.

She would learn later that civilisations had been charting the Unknown Regions for millennia; it wasn’t as much of a mystery as it sounded. But that knowledge had to come to an end somewhere, and part of Rey wondered if, somewhere out in the vast limitless expanse of stars, she would find the answers she sought.

Her grip tightened on the throttle. She had found something, alright.

The comm crackled again. Rey ignored it, staring determinedly ahead. She did not recognise the voices now: they sounded fainter, as if even in the vacuum of space they had come from somewhere very far away—as if it was not space at all, but time, across which they had travelled to reach her. They were hailing other ships again, shouting for people she did not know. She knew so few of the Resistance beyond their faces, she thought distantly. If it were her place to call out for survivors, she wouldn’t even know where to begin.

As time passed the hails became more urgent, twisted by distortion into garbled pleas for answers, a desperation closer to grief in the unfamiliar voices as they called and called across the stars, searching for comrades-in-arms who, in all likelihood, were beyond hearing.

Unease filled her, and she was reaching to switch off the comm when—

_ “Rey.” _

A voice, loud and clear as if the speaker were right next to her.

_ His  _ voice.

Rey froze, hand poised in mid-air over the dashboard. Her heart thudded against her ribs: cold shock flooded her body like icy water.

“Ben?” she breathed, staring down at the comm relay as if half-expecting to see him clamber out of the console, filthy and bedraggled and  _ grinning  _ like he had been in those final seconds. Before—

She must have misheard the hail, she decided. Easily done, between the ringing in her ears and the interference with the frequency. It was someone else calling for her, checking to see why she hadn’t responded earlier. It wasn’t—it  _ couldn’t  _ have been—

It was, though. She knew his voice: she knew it in fury and frustration and mockery and sorrow, in fascination and pleading and frail, faltering hope. How many times had she repeated his gentle promise to herself, over and over in her mind when sleep wouldn’t come but the loneliness would? How often had she wrapped his words about her like armour, whispering them again and again until their talismanic magic eased the hollowness in her heart?

_ You’re not alone. _

Too often, and now look.

Stupid, to imagine she could rely on anyone but herself.

She had imagined it, then. Rey set her jaw and blinked through the fog that had stolen over her vision. He was dead. Gone. Become the Force, as the Jedi used to say, into which he vanished as if he had never been. The torn shirt in her lap, the boots and trousers beside her feet, were all the evidence that he had ever existed.

_ No, _ she thought, with a pang of shame. Not all. She had been dead, and now she wasn’t, and it was because of him. Did that not make her proof of his living? Wasn’t her survival the truest testament to his existence that there was?

He was gone, but she remained.

And she was hearing his voice in her head.

“Going mad,” Rey muttered, then snorted. “Bound to happen sooner or later.”

But her free hand had fallen to her lap and she couldn’t help running her fingers over his shirt; closing her eyes, rubbing her thumb against a snag in the cloth, she let herself imagine that it was real.

“Be with me,” she whispered.

The voices had gone silent. Whatever, whoever they were, living or dead or something in between, she was alone once more.

The solar storm loomed up ahead when she opened her eyes, a bright swathe of crimson seared across the stars, barring her path home—or the closest thing she had to one. Rey stared down the irradiated blaze, willing it to subside; pleading with the galaxy for something,  _ anything,  _ to look kindly on her. Just this once. She had nothing left to give it, she reasoned, if you could call bargaining with an indifferent universe  _ reason _ . The last few days had taken everything. She was empty: she was exhausted, she longed for nothing more than to get her head down somewhere and  _ sleep  _ for at least a week, hopefully free of dreams, but the journey wasn’t over yet.

Rey dropped the shirt into her lap and leant forward to recalibrate the X-wing’s astrogator, reversing the route she had followed to get here, before settling back in her seat, wrapping both hands around the throttle, and gunning straight for the heart of the inferno.

⚶

It felt strange, stepping out into the gentle sunlight and humid air of Ajan Kloss, after hours in a frigid X-wing—and before that the tomblike night of Exegol. To be blinking shards of golden light from her eyelashes instead of tears; to be as a wandering ghost among the laughing, weeping,  _ living  _ all around her.

Hands gripped her shoulders and hauled her into a fierce embrace: Rey clung to the arms that held her, breathing in Finn’s familiar warmth as he shuddered against her like a tower on the verge of collapse. Her mind was still lightyears away. She stood, bracketed by her friends, as the minutes blurred into hours; as all around them frantic reunions turned to dazed elation turned to breaking open the mess stores and giving vent to all the mingled joy and sorrow and  _ relief _ of surviving to see this day, and before she knew it twilight had descended.

The celebrations had long since moved outside, innumerable fires springing up under the trees as night fell. Rey sat in the hangar, beside the bier upon which the white cloth was still draped. There was nothing else there, not even the fading glimmer of a presence in the Force: Leia had not been here in those final moments; she was not here now. Rey bowed her head over her lap where the two sabers lay bundled up with Ben’s shirt. Her treasures. All she had been able to save from this day of losses.

Still a scavenger, after all, she reflected bitterly. Still fighting tooth and nail for scraps.

“Rey?”

The voice made her jump: she twisted around to find Rose standing a few feet away, watching her with an unreadable expression. When Rey's eyes met hers, though, whatever she saw there made her gaze soften.

“Hey,” she said gently.

Rey sat up a little straighter, reflexively bringing the shirt and sabers closer to her body. “Hi.”

“Are you…” Rose seemed to reconsider the question as soon as she'd started to ask it, or maybe the answer was just that obvious. “Would you mind some company?”

For a second, Rey simply stared at her.  _ Company.  _ Even after all this time she had little notion of it, though she knew the alternative all too well. A year, living and sleeping and fighting and learning among these people, and it was still the easier choice to remove herself from them—to tell herself that isolation was her only option, and it wasn’t just that she was a coward.

That allowing herself this new present, the possibility of a future, meant admitting the past was dead.

Maybe that was why she shook her head, now, and nodded Rose toward the seat beside her.

A different kind of quiet fell over them. It felt less like she was hiding from something, having someone else sit with her on the periphery of the noise, the bittersweet celebrations going on nearby. It felt less lonely; less like the bonds that tethered her to the Resistance and to the life she had begun to build were already fraying away.

Eventually, Rose broke the silence.

“Hell of a day,” she muttered.

Rey managed a grunt in response.

“Heard you fought a Sith army, or something.”

That made her blink in surprise, though she was too exhausted to manage much more. “Huh.”

“Don’t tell me...wild exaggeration?”

“Mhm.”

“Figured. Not that you couldn’t, or anything. Probably. It just seemed crazy.”

Rey snorted.

“I mean,  _ crazier _ . I think we’ve all got a pretty high threshold for insanity these days.”

“I...yeah.”

Outside a cheer went up, and gradually turned into off-key singing. An old starfarer’s lament, Rey thought, every note suffused with melancholy and memory and hope. More voices joined as the tune carried on, threading together and drifting up with the smoke into the treetops.

“Maz said,” Rose began, hesitantly. “That she was trying to reach her son. To save him.”

A cold fist closed around Rey’s heart. The singing seemed very far away, suddenly.

“Did it...work?”

Rey blew out a breath, shrugged listlessly. “Kind of. He’s dead now, too.”

“Oh.”

She wondered, then, how much Rose knew. How much Leia had shared with any of them.

“They’re all dead,” she said quietly.


	3. Chapter 3

_Ajan Kloss_

⚶

At what precise point Rose pulled out the moonshine, Rey couldn’t say. The two of them had fallen into a companionable silence, an introspective hush punctuated only by the occasional eruption of noise from outside. Here in the quiet, in the company of the fallen, together they held their sombre vigil, each woman lost in her own thoughts—until distantly Rey became aware of a scratching sound, and then out of nowhere there was an opaque, unlabelled bottle being shaken gently in front of her face.

“I know you don’t normally like to,” Rose said, when Rey glanced sideways at her. “But I figured...fuck it, right?”

It was hard to muster an argument to that.

“Fuck it,” Rey agreed, accepting the bottle and tipping it toward Rose in wry salute. “Bones and all.”

She was halfway to taking a sip when she realised Rose was staring at her. “What?”

_“‘Bones and all’?”_

“Oh. It’s, uh, a local toast.”

“Huh. Kind of macabre, isn’t it?”

Rey contemplated that. Either her threshold for morbidity was also unusually high, or… “Jakku’s just like that.”

Rose made a face. “What does it mean?”

That gave Rey pause. What the phrase meant to those she'd heard say it, and what it had meant to her, she had never really had the opportunity to reconcile. “I...never really knew. I overheard junkers say it, and I used to think it meant…like... _take it all_. Life is hard, take what you can get. _Bones and all._ Even the ones who liked to think they were better than scavengers couldn’t afford to be choosy.”

She lifted the bottle to her lips and took a short swig, holding the liquor on her tongue for a second before she let it slide down her throat. It was cold, at first, a bright, shivery, silvery sensation like winter’s icy fingers crawling over her insides—and then she took a breath, and all at once her chest caught _fire_.

She had been expected it to burn—nothing that came in a flask that looked as if it might have once contained machine oil went down smoothly—but the rush of heat still left Rey spluttering into her hand, tears threatening to overflow from her eyes, and she blinked them stubbornly away as she turned and passed the bottle back to Rose.

“Gods,” she said, relieved when her voice came out only slightly hoarse. “Which engine did you siphon that from?”

A tiny smirk was the only answer Rose gave as she tilted the bottle against her lips and took a more generous mouthful. She handed the flask back without a word: Rey cradled it between her hands, still feeling the warmth of that first sip unfurling slowly through her body.

“As I got older,” she continued, tugging on the thread of memory until something came loose inside her: until the snarled knot of the past began to unravel. “I started to think of it more like, make _them_ take all of you. Don’t make it easy on them. You know?”

“Yeah.” Rose looked, fleetingly, as if she had more to say—as if she understood the sentiment better than most, but then she snorted and just like that, the moment passed. “Back on Hays, we just said ‘cheers.’ Seems kind of tame, now.”

“That’s not such a bad thing.” There wasn’t much Rey wouldn’t have given for a tame life, if she’d had anything of value to give.

“Hmm, maybe not. Know any others?”

“Um, there's one that translates—loosely—to ‘to those dead bastards who had a worse time than us, may life trouble them never more.’ I think. It's less of a mouthful in Uthuthma.”

“Dark.”

“Or there’s ‘may Khepry never catch you.’”

Rose’s eyes went wide. “Oh, I like that. Who’s Khepry?”

“A giant scarab who eats the dead.”

“You’re kidding.”

“I...no?”

The other woman regarded her for a long few seconds. “You’re hard to read, you know. I genuinely can’t tell if you’re fucking with me.”

It was Rey’s turn to smile as she knocked back the bottle again—the stuff went down with marginally less protest this time, though it didn’t taste much better, and once she’d gotten over the urge to cough she shrugged. “He summons the sun every morning, too.”

“Busy guy.”

“Hmm,” she thought of the legends of the gods of the desert, the spirits and demons which called the wasteland home. Seldom did they sleep, in the stories: always it seemed they were occupied in warring, raging, or the business of annihilation, wreaking senseless indiscriminate mayhem on the mortals alongside whom they dwelled. She had always held herself to be too pragmatic, too rational to believe the myths, yet now the notion of all-powerful forces tugging the threads of fate this way and that, manipulating the cosmos to their ineffable will, was just—reality.

“Staying alive kept you busy, in that shithole.” The lightness in her own voice startled her. “No time to slack off and rest, not for anyone. Not even for a god, I guess.”

None but the dead, and even then—in a place like Goazon, odds were they wouldn’t be resting in peace for long.

Bones and all, and all that.

Rose’s mind had gone down a similar path, it seemed. Her gaze had fallen upon the empty bier, and her features took on a grave, reflective cast as she reached for the flask in Rey’s hand. “For her,” she said softly, with a nod toward the platform. She held the bottle on her knee for a second, then raised it. “The general.”

When she had taken another sip and returned the bottle, Rey mirrored her gesture. “Leia,” she murmured. Then, more quietly, “I’m sorry.”

If Rose heard the way her voice shook, she was gracious enough to pretend otherwise.

Outside, the revelry had grown more subdued. Dusk was turning in earnest toward night, and it was almost totally dark within the command centre now; a lone, dim strip light illuminated their corner of the hangar, just enough to see each other’s faces in the indigo gloom.

When she lifted the bottle again, Rey could barely see her own hand in front of her.

“She should’ve been here,” she said quietly, unable to keep the bitterness from her voice.

“Yeah,” murmured Rose. “A lot of people should.”

The words dropped like a weight in the pit of Rey’s stomach. Inwardly she cursed herself: _thoughtless fool._ She wasn’t the only one who had lost someone to this war. Others grieved, had been grieving for far longer than her and with a far greater right to, and here she was blundering into their mourning with her carelessness—how callous, selfish, _stupid—_

“I’m sorry,” she said again, this time to the living girl beside her. Then, because it was true, and because she had learned by now how best to coax Rose out of her shell. “I wish she was. I would’ve liked to know her.”

Rose smiled ruefully. Her hand drifted to her pendant, fingers brushing over the polished smelt in a familiar, practiced motion. “She would’ve liked you.”

“I hope so.” The thought warmed Rey as thoroughly as the spirits had. “Really.”

“Oh, no doubt. She had more guts than sense and she didn’t take shit from anyone. You’d have gotten along great.”

“I…” It was a compliment, Rey thought. Possibly, it was one of the sweetest things anyone had ever said to her. She lowered her gaze, fixing her eyes on her lap so there was no way Rose could see her cheeks flush. “Thanks?”

“Hey,” Rose leant forward, nudging Rey’s arm with her elbow. She was smiling gently, her dark eyes filled with so much understanding. “I just mean—I admire it. You. The way I did her.”

Rey’s throat was suddenly tight, lodged with a thick knot of emotion for which she had no name. She forced herself to swallow past it, to breathe normally even though it felt like the knot was pushing its way up from her chest and if she opened her mouth it would all come flooding out—all of it, every ounce of hurt she held inside, every twisted root of pain she had strangled with her bare hands and buried deep rather than let it bloom until she was as barren as the desert she’d called home, and once it was gone...once it was gone she did not know what there would be left.

Taking a deep breath, she mastered herself, and offered Rose a pale imitation of her smile. “Thank you,” she repeated, hoping that this time she managed to convey just how much Rose’s words had meant.

She couldn’t know how little there was to admire in Rey. How there was never a moment when weakness and fury weren't at war inside her; how close she had come, more than once, to betraying them all, to losing control of herself and her power with terrible, fatal consequences. To proving right everything Palpatine had tried to make her believe about her blood.

Rose could never know.

No one could.

⚶

Their bunks had been given over to the wounded, Rey learned. She couldn’t begrudge it—she had no desire to sleep, and her quarters on the base had never really felt like hers anyway—but as the evening drew on she began to think longingly of her tiny bed on the _Falcon,_ of the bedclothes that age had softened long before she bartered them out of a second-hand vendor on Daalang. She had accumulated quite a respectable collection of colourful blankets over the past year, and as the night grew colder they became more and more of an enticing prospect.

It wasn’t till she felt Rose trembling beside her that she stirred herself to move.

“C’mon,” she muttered, lurching to her feet and giving Rose’s shoulder a squeeze. “Warmer on the ship.”

The jungle changed, after sunset. Darkness transformed the narrow spaces between the trees into labyrinthine alleyways wreathed in smoky blue and grey, the lush overgrowth of the forest into a sinister web of creeping, formless shadows. Each step demanded greater care, the mass of tangled roots and twisting vines underfoot posing a risk even to someone who hadn’t spent the last hour drinking freighter fuel.

Rey was not that person. Ordinarily she might have turned to the Force, to guide her without incident through the dusk, only she was coming to realise that it didn’t react at all well with hard liquor: trying to navigate her way past the worst obstacles with her senses shrouded in fog was like trying to capture rain in her bare hands—like trying to recall a face from the furthest past, or a voice from a half-forgotten dream.

Just one lesson, among many, she was learning far too late.

They were only twenty yards or so from the _Falcon_ when a figure emerged from the gloom, pale and insubstantial as a spectre drifting across their path. When she drew close they saw that she was an older woman, white-haired and slender, her features stricken by a naked grief that made the breath catch in Rey’s throat.

She passed them by without a word, vanishing into the shadows between them and the nearest bonfire.

For a moment, neither spoke. Then, beside her, Rose shivered.

“Norra,” she said softly. “Snap’s mom.”

Oh. Rey hadn’t thought, in the clamour and chaos following the battle, or the wave of numbness that came after, to ask after her friends’ friends. She’d gotten back later than the rest, had barely exchanged more than a few words even with Finn—stars, she hadn’t even _thought—_

Her selfishness sickened her.

“Is he…”

“Yeah.”

There was nothing that could be said to that. She hadn’t known him well; she hadn’t known so many of them, and now she never would. She should have felt something, anything, but she was hollow.

⚶

“Your move.”

“Oh, sorry.” Pushing herself upright, Rey leaned forward to survey the miniature arena. Between the three rings that comprised it a mismatched array of holographic monsters leered ineffectually at one another, each one uglier than the last, waiting with infinite patience for her to make her turn.

There were significantly more of Rose’s beasties left on the board, by this point. Only one round since, one of Rey’s pieces in the form of a grotesque purple worm had been obliterated by some sort of grey biped with glowing scarlet eyes, and now she was down to her last two; a lumpen blue creature that looked more like a child’s toy than a monster, and a gnarled, scaly-looking thing with unsettlingly long fingers, which it flexed menacingly at allies and enemies alike. Rose, on the other hand, hadn’t lost a piece yet.

Rey wasn’t much good at games, it turned out. She was starting to think she wasn’t much good at anything that wasn’t life or death.

How they had wound up in the middle of the most half-hearted round of dejarik ever played, she was only vaguely certain. One of them had activated the board by accident, she thought, trying to set the bottle down on the table—she remembered Rose yelping when the holograms exploded into life, though her mind got a little foggy when it came to what followed. She didn’t think they’d drunk that much, all told, but apparently Rose had a source for the good stuff because Rey was very quickly passing by the loose-limbed, warm and fuzzy phrase of inebriation and careening straight for a morning full of regrets.

If it meant she could forget, just for a little while, she couldn’t find it in herself to care.

“Chewie tried to teach me to play,” she said idly, still studying the field of holomonsters. “Emphasis on _tried.”_

Rose snorted. “Sure. Let me down gently.”

“I mean it. I think the word ‘hopeless’ was used.”

_“No.”_

_“Yeah.”_

“Well,” Rey felt Rose’s elbow nudge her in the side, “if it makes you feel better, you’re still a better pilot than Poe.”

Feigning sincere consideration for a second, she broke into a smile. “You know what? It does.”

“Can’t be good at everything, peaches.”

With a quiet huff of laughter Rey slumped back in the seat, making her move blindly. She hadn't been all that invested in the game even in the beginning, and nor had Rose; it was just one more distraction to take their minds off the day, to bolster the spirits coursing through their bodies like silver.

“Oof,” Rose's head lolled sideways, coming to rest on her shoulder. Rey waited for the instinctive urge to shove her off, but it never came. There was only her friend’s solid weight against her side, the slight tremor of her amusement as yet another of Rey's monsters bit the dust. “You _really_ can't.”

“Listen…”

“Hey, we all have our off days.”

“Did I pick the worst pieces, or something?”

“Would it make you feel better if I said yeah?”

“...It might.”

“And it’s not that you just suck at this?”

 _“Hey.”_ Despite everything that had happened in the past few days, Rey felt herself smiling. Despite the shock still casting a pall of numbness over her senses, despite the ocean of grief and heartsickness roiling just below the surface, her spirit was gladdened by Rose’s presence; her stubborn, resilient grace. She felt like they were piloting a fragile skiff across the surface of that ocean together, clinging for dear life to the one thing keeping them afloat.

“Just Grimtaash left.” Rose was faring marginally better, out of the two of them, which probably had something to do with the fact that Rey couldn't remember when she'd last eaten, but there was nonetheless a certain _languor_ in her voice that hadn't been there before. Her face, when Rey glanced down at her, was open and relaxed, a tired little smile playing across her mouth. She had a lovely smile, Rey thought, watching Rose’s fingers idly trace the grooves and planes of her necklace. There was something about the way laughter suffused her features: it was like a light turned on inside her, too bright to be contained, and brimming over, fell upon everything around her. “Come on, pull it back. You can still save this.”

Rey surveyed the board one final time, calculating the moves available to her sole remaining piece.

“I wish I had your optimism.”

⚶

“I kissed someone.” The words were out of her mouth before she’d even processed thinking them, and she could only pray that Rose hadn't heard.

As if she would be that lucky.

“I...what?”

Rey closed her eyes, cheeks aflame. The impulse took her to bolt—to make for the nearest exit as fast as her legs would carry her, take off into the forest and never show her face to another living being. How hard could it be, after all, to survive alone in a jungle?

More insidious, more frightening was the other thought, softer and sweet with effortless promise: that all she had to do was reach for the Force, fuzzy though her mind may be in this moment, and with it erase the last five seconds from Rose's memory.

(And from her own, while she was at it, along with the rest of the day and maybe the lifetime before it too.)

Yet now that the truth was out, suspended in the air between them like a dustmote in the sunlight—or more aptly, like an axe-blade waiting to fall—it no longer sat so heavily in her chest. The wound, which had wept sluggishly ever since it was carved into her in the abyssal darkness of Exegol, now bled freely, as if admitting what she’d done there had ripped it open anew. Or maybe, Rey thought, saying it aloud had made it real. It was no longer a secret, no longer a hazy memory that felt more and more like a dream with each passing hour. The truth belonged to another: it was no longer hers to bear alone, and though she had seldom felt deeper mortification in her life she felt _lighter_ too. As if a weight had been shed, or perhaps shared. However Rose took the confession, whatever questions were to come, there was no taking it back now.

And, Rey found, she didn’t _want_ to take it back.

“On Exegol. During the battle. I—I wasn’t alone.” Her voice shook, but she persevered. “He—he fought beside me, and he saved me, and I kissed him. And then he died.” Now her chin was trembling too, yet she fought for her composure even as she felt it slipping away. “One second he was there and the next he was... _gone.”_

On the last word she broke: her voice cracked and the tears began to fall unchecked, raining onto her hands where they lay in her lap. Rey turned her face to the side in a vain attempt to rescue her last scraps of dignity but she knew—she knew it was no use.

“Oh.” Rose sounded _bereft_. “Oh, Rey—I’m so sorry. I didn’t—”

Rey flinched when she felt hands on her arms, but the attack for which her life had taught her to be ever-vigilant never came: instead she was pulled into an embrace, her head coming to rest in the crook of Rose’s neck. She breathed in the scent of sweat and smoke, let it fill her lungs and replace the hollowness inside her for a brief time that would never be long enough.

 _Just for a second,_ she thought, turning her face into Rose’s shoulder. _Just for a little while_.

“I’m sorry,” Rose breathed again.

Her tears flowed, unbated. Rey could feel each one slide down her cheek and she cursed her own weakness—cursed the _waste_ as they trailed away into nothing, soaked up into the worn cloth of Rose’s shirt, as her shoulders shook and her breaths turned to sobs and still Rose gripped her, calloused fingers warm against her bicep, the hitch in her own breathing betraying her kindred grief. Rey balled her hands into fists until she felt her nails digging into her palms, fighting a silent war to regain control. Weeping would solve nothing. There was nothing to be gained or mended by crying like a lost child—that had been one of the very first lessons Jakku had imparted. Her tears could water the earth until it flooded, perhaps, but they could not bring life to something that had lost it.

She was just so _tired,_ drained and exhausted in every way a person could be. She could not muster the strength to dash them away.

“He saved me,” she said again, because someone had to know. Someone had to remember. “He fought beside me, and he healed me. And then he died.”

She recalled his smile, the shattering swell of hope in his dark eyes, the way joy had transformed his features beyond beauty into something that threatened to stop her heart all over again.

“He didn’t need to,” she spoke bitterly. “He could have lived. He didn’t even need to be there. I don’t—” Her voice failed again, and she squeezed her eyes shut and turned her face into Rose’s shoulder. “I don’t _understand.”_

Rose was quiet for a long time, her cheek resting against Rey’s head, her thumb gently rubbing her arm. Perhaps she was lost in thought, searching for an answer; perhaps she thought there was no answer that could possibly suffice.

“I do,” she murmured eventually, tightening her hold on Rey as if she feared she might run. “He was saving what he loved.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this sure is getting away from me huh
> 
> thank u dany for the toast suggestion xoxo


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> let's just pretend this didn't take four months and that I haven't lost control of my life

_Ajan Kloss_

⚶

In her dreams, she saw the island.

Beneath an indigo sky she walked along the shore, her bare feet skimming the very edge of the surf. The ocean lapped around her ankles, cresting in little waves that left lacy trails of silver foam in their wake and glimmered in the dusk like some celestial titan bleeding out across the sands.

The rush of the sea echoed around the island’s craggy heights, the night air filled with the rumbling sonorities of the tides. Within that roaring sigh, in the thousand mingled voices of the deep, Rey thought she heard her name being called.

It urged her onward, beckoning her into the shadow of the cliffs and the darkness she could feel even now was waiting there.

There was no doubt in her mind that it waited for her. That she had to find it—to go down into that place and see with her own eyes what lay beyond the reach of the light.

When she came to the spot where the sand gave way to salt-slick rocks, and then to a crevasse descending deep into the island’s hidden heart, she didn’t hesitate. Feet-first, lungs straining with all the air she could pull into them, Rey squeezed her eyes shut and cast herself down into the abyss.

She fell for a small eternity, the cold air whipping past her head tearing her hair free from its ties as she tumbled deeper and deeper into the earth—until finally, when she thought that surely there could be no further to fall, she slammed into the surface of the frigid sea.

The water closed over her head like a grave. Rey fought back a surge of panic as it began to drag her under, pulling on her limbs like so many grasping hands: kicking furiously against the current she managed to struggle back to the surface and broke through with a ragged gasp, blinking away the salt clinging to her lashes until she could make out the dim outline of the cave around her.

By that watery light she was able to navigate her way to shore, fumbling for purchase on rocks worn smooth by the tide. Once she had hauled herself up onto them she could only lie there for a breathless moment in the dark, the sound of the waves and of her own heartbeat thunderous in her ears.

Far above, a sliver of purple sky winked through the fissure in the cavern’s roof, the star-strewn eye of night gazing balefully down at earth. Rey stared back from where she lay upon the cold stone, slowly recovering her breath as the purple deepened inexorably to black.

And then, one by one, the stars began to fall.

When the darkness had grown so dense that she could hardly see, she rolled over and propped herself up on her elbows, searching the gloom at the back of the cave for whatever strange force had called her here.

But what she found was not a cave at all.

It was a door.

⚶

She woke alone, as she had ten thousand times before. Strange, then, that this time should feel different.

There was no telling how much time had passed since she’d traipsed back to her cabin and collapsed face-first into the bunk, head spinning from the drink and ears still ringing with laughter that tripped over the edge into hysteria at times. It could have been morning—the soft yellow glow permeating the second mate’s berth gave away nothing of the world outside, while the chrono set into the wall beside the bunk likely hadn’t worked in decades. Here in the half-dark she had found herself a space outside of time; a tiny place where the ravages of the previous days could not touch her.

But the longer she lay there, counting each breath, the more Rey became aware of the cracks in her sanctuary.

Like a tree, its branches weaving through the fabric of the universe itself, the Force touched all things, and she was only one branch—one leaf, one _bud—_ among countless trillions and trillions on that tree, connected to every other. Through the fog of sleep she felt other life-forms moving beyond the cabin’s walls: further out, past the _Falcon’s_ hull, she sensed more of them milling about in the jungle, indistinct points of animate light drifting dimly through the dark. It should have been a comfort, to know that she was not alone.

It should have been...anything.

Most of the base seemed to still be awake, but it wasn’t this that betrayed how little time had passed since she’d fallen asleep.

It was the headache—or rather, the lack of one. She and Rose must have put away the whole bottle of that foul spirit between them: she had only the vaguest recollection of stumbling through the ship’s corridors on her way to bed, and no memory at all of bidding Rose goodnight, but by some miracle her body hurt far more than her head did in this moment, waiting with an uncertain sense of dread for the other shoe to drop.

She didn’t have long to wait. Her mouth tasted like something had crawled inside and died there, her limbs resisting every effort to push herself upright, but it took sitting up and nearly toppling right over again for Rey to realise why she seemed to have escaped a hangover.

It was because she was still kriffing _drunk_.

_What the hell was in that stuff, Rose?_

A chill had crept into the berth while she slept. Rubbing the grit from her eyes with one hand, she searched with the other for something warm to throw over her tunic, and managed to locate a heap of black cloth that stank of smoke and sweat. Rey stared at it for a bewildered second, her exhausted brain working overtime to process how someone else’s clothes had wound up in her bed.

When she remembered, she immediately wished that she could forget again. Turning the shirt over in her hands, she rubbed her thumbs against its softness, torn between tossing it straight in the garbage disposal and burying her face in it to sob her eyes out again—before she rolled over, shoved her head under the covers and called this whole day a lost cause.

Practicality won out. It was cold, and she probably smelled no better: it was pure pragmatism that had her pulling the shirt over her head and rolling the sleeves up to free her hands, nothing more. Certainly not sentiment—and certainly not the strange sense of reassurance it lent her, enveloping her in soft fabric and the reek of battle that carried beneath it just the faintest trace of...

Grief pierced the fog, sharp and hollow as hunger in the guts. Rey closed her eyes and breathed deeply until it passed, until the clouds rolled in once more and all she felt was oblivion tugging her under. She clung to it, to the solace it offered, and to that small measure of comfort that came of remembering.

It was different. It wasn’t the same as having hope.

On the edge of the bunk she paused, dragging her fingers through her hair in an attempt to tame it. She didn’t remember tossing and turning, but the combination of sweat, salt and smoke from last night’s fires had turned her hair into a wild rat’s nest that would take real water and soap to tackle, and she winced as her fingers snagged in the greasy knots.

Her next stop would be the ‘fresher, once she’d soothed her parched throat and washed away the dead rodent currently squatting on her tongue.

And once she’d checked on Rose. The porgs who’d made a home in the corridor outside her berth crooned a sleepy alarm as she shuffled out, settling back into a doze when they realised she wasn’t Chewie. The tiny things had adapted remarkably well to their new ecosystem, but they still had yet to take to the Wookiee—they had long memories, it seemed, in addition to their loud little voices.

It was strange, being surrounded by so many little lights; having other creatures sleeping so close. Strange, but not unwelcome. It made the dark fog that transfixed her just a little less suffocating: it made the haunted old ship feel almost like home.

A glance at the chrono in the kitchen confirmed her suspicions: not even four hours had passed since she and Rose had called it a night. The bottle still stood on the dejarik board where they’d left it, its innocuous exterior betraying nothing of its foul contents. Rey glowered at it from across the room as she drained three cups of water in quick succession, then turned to fill another from the caf machine for good measure.

All the while, she attempted to channel her connection to the Force into healing, letting it flood her mind and body to clear away the lingering poison. She had never really been one to imbibe—not that there had been all that many opportunities before she left Jakku, but the months since had done little to alter her feelings on the matter. She didn’t like alcohol; didn’t like the way it dulled her senses and slowed her wits, made her feel sloppy and exposed and _vulnerable._ She hated the way it made things she’d fought hard to suppress and compartmentalise rise up to the surface again, because right now her ability to compartmentalise was the only thing holding her together.

If she wavered, even for a moment, if she let her walls slip...she did not think she would be able to come back.

Her self-control had always felt like a precipice, some teetering edge on which she scraped her fingernails raw just trying to cling on. She had glimpsed, in her darkest moments, what awaited her on the other side, and she had no wish to get a closer look.

She had seen, too, the version of herself that lived always in that darkness, and she never wished to see it again.

Caf in hand Rey headed into the cockpit, pausing on the threshold when she saw the massive figure slumped in the co-pilot’s chair. Careful not to disturb him, without saying a word, she slipped in beside him and took her own seat.

Chewie said nothing either—he didn’t even look at her. His gaze was fixed in the darkness of the jungle beyond the viewport, lost in whatever he could see there in the night.

When she followed his eyeline all Rey saw was their reflections haloed in the harsh glow of the cockpit, her own pale face made almost ghostly by the black shirt that swamped her. She looked like a mad thing, all tousled hair and bruised eyes. She looked like a girl half-dead.

More than half. Rey wrapped her arms around herself, seeking assurance in the solidity of her own body under her hands. She’d _died,_ yesterday. She had been actually, fully _dead._ Heart gone silent, flesh gone cold, no good for anything but carrion. If there was another side she had visited it, briefly; touched the void and been recalled to life.

But maybe all of her hadn’t made the return journey. Maybe she had left some of herself behind.

Rey shivered, and focussed her attention on Chewie to distract herself from the thought. She’d never been one for unnecessary words, really, and now she took her cue from him and let the quiet enfold them once more.

What words were there, anyway?

How could anything she said possibly be enough?

After minutes, or hours, or seconds, it was Chewie who broke the silence.

“I have outlived them all,” he spoke gravely. “My friends, and their boy. All of them, gone into the night before me.”

Wookiees had long lifespans, compared to humans, but none of the Skywalkers had lived long enough for it to matter.

Still the words refused to come. All she could do was let him think, and mourn, and eventually continue.

“I was alive, when his grandfather’s shadow fell over the galaxy. I heard over the holowaves, when his grandmother went to her grave. I was a warrior grown when his parents came into the world. I came before all of them, but I never thought I would outlast them too. Not him. Not Ben.”

The sound that left him then was the most piteous Rey had ever heard, and became a low moan of grief that went on and on as Chewie bowed his head and began to weep. His broad shoulders shook hard enough to send tremors through the seat—and through Rey as well, she thought briefly, until the first sob tore free from her throat and she realised that she was crying too.

She pressed a hand against her mouth to muffle the sound but it was too late—too late to stem the tide of anguish, too late to keep the tears from coming.

She hadn’t thought it would be like this, either. She had seen the future— _their future_ —and it hadn’t looked like this.

Ben had been with her. That was what the vision had shown her, when they crossed space and time to touch. That was what the Force had promised: he had been alive, and whole, and they had been _happy._

What had she done wrong? Somewhere along the line that future had changed, had been snuffed out as instantly and as irrevocably as his life. Somewhere, somehow, she must have taken the wrong path.

What choice had she made, or not made, to have lost the chance at that life? What could she have done, to have made a difference?

 _I don’t know how to fix this,_ she thought desperately. _I don’t know what to do._

But the Force was silent: the universe had no answer for her. Overwhelmed by everything, consumed by a storm of her own pain, Rey put her head in her hands, and cried.

⚶

On her way back to the crew quarters she paused to refill her caf and fill another cup of water, conscious of the first stirrings of awareness on the other side of the first mate’s door.

She had just raised her hand and was about to knock when said door slid open, and a small, bleary-eyed Rose appeared.

“Hey,” she mumbled drowsily. She looked flushed, and so very soft with her hair loose around her shoulders, tousled on one side from the pillow. “How come you don’t look like shit?”

That was a generous assessment, Rey thought.

“I think you have to get past the drunk stage to get to the hangover.”

“Ugh. I am calling Force bullshit on you, Rey of Jakku.” Rose made a grateful sound when Rey handed her the water, lifting it immediately to her lips, but Rey noticed the way her eyes zeroed in on the mug of caf she still held and so once she’d taken a sip of her own, she held it out.

“Here.”

Rose took a step back in protest. “Wh—no, it’s okay.”

“Have it.” Rey all but pushed the cup into her hands, forcing a reassuring smile. “I’ll get another one.”

“I…” For all she could be as stubborn as a rock when she wanted to be, it took all of two seconds for Rose’s resistance to crumble. “You are a saint.”

Rey snorted. “Can you tell Dameron that?”

Rose’s low laughter followed her as she made her way back to the kitchen: the other girl leant against the wall and watched while Rey fetched herself a fresh mug, taking a moment to give her reflection a once-over in the cup’s mirrored surface. She tried to be subtle about it, hoping it wasn’t too obvious that she’d been sobbing her eyes out less than half an hour ago, but since she’d been crying in Rose’s arms barely four hours before _that_ she figured there wasn’t much point in pretending.

She felt Rose’s inquisitive gaze on her back, the internal battle raging between curiosity and restraint. When the former eventually won out, though, it was guided by nothing but compassion.

“How are you?” Rose asked quietly, watching her from over the rim of her caf. “Did you sleep much?”

“A little.” Rey turned to lean against the counter so she could look at Rose properly, studying her friend’s face. Her brown eyes were rimmed in red, her cheeks puffy from weeping: she looked utterly exhausted. “Not well.”

“Yeah. Sounds like the party’s still going?”

Rey imagined it would probably be going until dawn. “You want to go back?”

“Oh—no. This is...this is kind of nice.” Rose’s smile did not quite reach her eyes. “Like you said before: being out there, with everybody, it just...makes you think of all the people who didn’t get to be here.”

Rey had no answer for that, so she simply nodded.

“Is it okay with you if I hang around here?”

She blinked. “Of course?”

“Alright. Cool. I just...didn’t want to outstay my welcome.”

“Oh. No...Rose, you couldn’t. Besides,” Rey shrugged, suddenly very aware of how little she wanted to be left alone right now. “It’s not my ship, not really. It’s Chewie’s.”

There was too much understanding in Rose’s expression: Rey looked away so she didn’t have to see it. “You live here too, Rey.”

“Well...yeah,” Rey frowned, turning the thought over in her head. Technically the _Falcon_ had been her home for months now: she had been sleeping aboard it and piloting it and helping to maintain it ever since she’d left her old life, and still it was hard to feel like she belonged. Like it couldn’t all be ripped away in an instant, leaving her homeless and alone again. “But I’ve got nowhere else to go.”

She’d meant it as a joke, of sorts, and thankfully Rose seemed to take it as one.

“I mean, there’s always the barracks,” she replied slyly, taking a long inhale over her caf and letting out a blissful sigh. “If you like.”

This time, Rey’s smile was real. “I’ll pass.”

“Good.” Rose grinned. “Because I think this old girl likes you more than you give her credit for, and if I had a bed to myself, I wouldn’t be sniffing at it.”

The _Falcon’s_ circadian lights shifted from their night cycle to dawn, then, as if in tacit agreement, and Rey knew well enough when to concede a point.

“If this is you angling for a cabin, you know you just have to ask.”

Rose’s eyes brightened. “If this is you offering, I accept.”

⚶

_Elsewhere_

⚶

Void.

The silence deafens. The nothingness is absolute. On all sides, in every direction (if there can be such a thing as _directions_ where there are no horizons, no landmarks or poles or guiding points of any kind), there is only light. Blinding, brilliant, annihilating light.

Infinite illumination: immensity beyond all comprehension. Radiance like violence, that burns even as it reveals, like floating in the heart of a collapsing star. Light without a source; light without end.

It is different to the blackness of deep space, the unfolding night which can be both embryonic and sarcophagic by turns. Darkness is its own entity: it surrounds, isolates, overcomes. Light is something else entirely.

Darkness suffocates; light _devours_.

And there are no stars, in this expanse: no suns or moons, and maybe no sky at all. Stars and suns and skies belong to the material universe; this place does not.

This place is not a _place_ at all but somewhere in-between, out of time and out of space, not quite the realm of death but closer to it than to life. Between worlds, and beyond worlds: somewhere which is really nowhere.

And in the heart of this immeasurable expanse of _nothing,_ something that was once a man.

A man he had been, in life, but this place is not the living world and he is not alive in it—neither, though, is he dead. He is not even a _he,_ anymore, but an _is:_ houseless spirit, unfettered consciousness, the disembodied flicker of _something_ in the midst of all this nonbeing. Nameless, selfless, nothing but scattered disparate atoms haunted by the memory of a soul.

Sometimes, memory is enough.

**Author's Note:**

> terrio: we made rey a palpatine because we couldn't come up with conflict for her based on what we had (:  
> me: how tf are you employed


End file.
